DEAD SEA MARATHON

One of Cranky's daughters, with the aid of her husband, recently completed the Dead Sea Marathon in Jordan (That's right, the Middle East. Here is her account).

My last marathon was a year and a half ago, the Marine Corp Marathon in Washington, DC. On April 10, 2009, I went for my thirteenth marathon, which would also be my first outside the United States. I completed all of my prior marathons attempts and four out of six ultra-marathon attempts. On one attempt at a 62-miler, I got lost on the race course in the mountains of Utah and missed a time cut. On a 100-miler attempt, once again in Utah, I ended up with altitude sickness and in the ER after mile 52. Obviously, Utah and I have problems. I have also completed various 20-milers, half-marathons, 10-milers, 10ks, and 5ks.

Let me set the record straight: I am not a fast marathoner. I fall somewhere in the middle of the pack. So why do I keep coming back to the start line? Maybe it’s an addiction to bodily torture, or maybe it’s just the t-shirt. I don’t have a good answer.

Several months ago I signed up for the Dead Sea Marathon in Jordan. My husband Stephen and I currently live in Kuwait, and we figured the marathon would be a good excuse to visit Jordan to see the sites. The marathon itself was point-to-point: the city of Amman to the Dead Sea. Several other distances were also being run: an ultra-marathon, a half-marathon, and a 10k.

The beginning of the trip was great. We were in a hotel adjacent to the Dead Sea, near the finish line. We enjoyed two days of hiking in Petra. We spent another day exploring around the Dead Sea. On day four, our tour driver took us into Amman for a pre-race evening pasta party. Stephen and I spent the evening looking at the other runners and guessing which distance they were running. The ride back to the Dead Sea from the Amman hotel was down a long steep hill. We passed the zero sea level marker and got out to take photos in the dark. As we got closer to the hotel, we began to wonder if this was the actual road I was going to run down for the race itself. I had read on the race website that the course was a downhill steep course, but I never imagined it was that steep.

I was to be picked up at the hotel at 4:00 a.m. and taken to the race’s start in Amman. A few other folks I knew from Kuwait, including a co-worker’s husband, were running other distances. So I figured I would just look for them in the hotel lobby, and we would make sure we all got on the proper bus. My wonderful husband made sure I was up at 3:15 a.m. He was even kind enough to accompany me downstairs to the lobby; however, at approximately 3:50 a.m. we walked into an empty lobby. Where were all the frigging runners? My already nervous stomach started doing extra flip-flops.

Stephen finally spotted a man in running clothes headed downstairs. He followed the man, reappearing moments later to report that a large group of runners was downstairs enjoying breakfast treats. We found some of our friends from Kuwait. Stephen earned some points by being the only family member of all our friends there to escort a runner to the hotel lobby at 0-dark-thirty.

Of course, the bus didn’t leave until 4:15 a.m., but we all managed to find a seat and settle in. About a third of the way into the ride, which was up the same steep road Stephen and I had descended the evening before, I saw in the dim light a disturbing sight across the aisle. A woman had both hands in her running pants and was moving them rapidly. I know about running and chaffing, so I assume she was applying some sort of body glide to her lower regions. Last time I checked, however, this activity only took a few seconds, not half of a 45-minute bus ride!

We arrived at the check-in location a little after 5:00 a.m. A large group of runners appeared to be wandering aimlessly around an elementary school. It was freezing outside, so our group went into the school lobby for warmth and bathrooms. Time started ticking by with no official race personnel in sight. Finally, we begin to notice a group was gathering outside and boarding buses. None of the race officials herding people onto the buses knew anything about checking in. They were just working to quickly place folks onto buses to get them to various starting points. I latched on to a group of runners with a similar bib color as my own, a color that identified us as marathoners. I figured if I boarded a bus with folks wearing blue bibs, then my chances of ended up in the wrong place were slim.

We finally got on a bus. The driver started off, only to turn the corner and stop near a group of runners and cops about two blocks from the school. Fortunately, before we stepped off the bus, one of us realized that we were at the ultra-marathoners’ start. The individual started yelling at the bus driver in both Arabic and English for driving us to the wrong start line. The bus driver shook his head to indicate that if this wasn’t the place we were supposed to be, he had no idea where to take us. Great, so basically after not checking in at the supposed check-in location, we were now lost in Amman, and the clock was ticking to start time! The individual yelling at the bus driver managed to stop his ranting for a moment to jump off the bus and ask for directions. After driving around Amman for another fifteen minutes, the bus driver managed to find the marathon start line. Turns out we were the first marathoner bus to arrive.

Runners quickly took up positions in front of the two port-a-potties to get in that last bathroom break. The port-a-potties were locked. Of course the male runners immediately headed behind a nearby building to empty their bladders. We women tried to figure out what to do. Finally the individual who had yelled at the lost bus driver earlier came to our rescue when he managed to pick the locks of the port-a-potties.

I didn’t have a watch on, but I did know that we had been hanging out at the start line for quite a while and that more buses were still arriving. One bus even tried to pull underneath the start line banner and got stuck, almost managing to pull down the start line! We thought the race started at 6:30 a.m., but the time was approaching 7:00 a.m.. Finally, an official showed up and told us that the start would be in fifteen minutes. In the meantime she wanted us lined up under the start line banner for a group photo. Great, just what I needed to get me psyched for the race!

At this point, those of us experienced with chip-timed races noticed that the start line had no chip mat. So why the heck had we been issued chips to attach to our shoes? If the race wasn’t going to be chip-timed from start to finish, what was the point? One runner commented that the race directors could have cared less if we cheated in starting the race; they just wanted to make sure we didn’t cheat at the finish!

Finally, a little past 7:00 a.m., the race official moved the start banner to the middle of the road. The cops north of the start line seem finally to have stopped car traffic from heading down the supposedly closed road that was the course. At least we thought we wouldn’t have to dodge those crazy drivers! We all ambled over to the start line. I was several feet back and still nervously looking around, waiting for the start. All of a sudden people several places in front of me began running. To avoid getting trampled, I did the same. Where were the 5 minute and 1 minute warnings, or even a “ready-set-go”?!

I started out following my father’s motto: start slow, ease off. About 2 km into the race, I began struggling with kilometer-to-mile conversions. Most of us Americans think in miles. It’s one reason the rest of the world finds us so lovable. I figured out quickly that at least one advantage to a kilometer race is that the markers go by quicker! Wonder why that is? Anyway, at about 2.5 km I realized I was beginning to go down that long steep winding road that we had climbed that morning in the bus. My body was already protesting and I still had over 20 or 30 downhill kilometers to go. I started noticing signs on the road warning drivers about a steep grade and advising trucks to use low gears. Great. A little downhill is one thing, but this was not what I had in mind.

At about this point, a male several paces in front of me took off his shoes. Now I know there are some Kenyans that run barefoot, but this guy was no Kenyan. I stopped thinking about his possible pain; however, when at about 10 km into the race, I felt my right big toe strike the tip of my shoe with such force that I knew the toenail was a goner! Now I have lost toenails before in ultra-races, but never in a marathon. And yes, Dad, I tried to remember heal-toe-heal-toe going downhill, but gosh darn it, that hill was just becoming longer by the minute and my feet weren’t listening to the rest of my body!

At about 12 km the front ultra-runners starting bearing down on me. The front runner flew past in his downhill momentum mode. Yeah, I was a little jealous, but hey, at least I was out there running! Then I just happen to look to my right and saw a white female butt glimmering in the sun. Yes, it is a common site in marathons and ultra-marathons in the United States to see the back of a man or the butt of a squatting woman as they answer a call of nature just off the course. But this was a more conservative area of the world. There were quite a few cars honking and people yelling at that poor woman, who was just trying to empty her downhill-jarred bladder!

Near this point I took off my running jacket and shoved it into my hip pocket. The temperature was rising as we began to drop into the Dead Sea Valley. Small groups of people were gathered every few kilometers. I noticed that one person in a group would yell out something as each runner passed and another person would write something down. It finally dawned on me that they were recording my race number, the running chips apparently being for decoration. And my number in Arabic was something like “phlegm hamza hamza.”

Before the halfway point was the zero sea level marker. But the course would not be leveling out any time soon. The Dead Sea is below sea level, not just a little bit, but a lot, 1,385 feet (422 meters if you’re addicted to the metric system). So there was a lot of downhill left. After the halfway point, I decided I would try to walk at the next water station. I had not yet taken a break, and a short walk would permit me to really drink the water instead of aiming it at my mouth while running, hoping some would go in. As soon as I started walking, however, I encountered jelly legs for the first time in my life. I had never before had the jelly feeling some folks describe in their legs after running long races. So yes, running down a steep grade for 25 km can make your legs feel like jelly. I immediately starting running again, slowly, for fear my jelly legs might collapse if I kept walking.

The course finally started to level out, and the northern edge of the Dead Sea was clearly visible. Signs appeared for Bethany, the Baptismal site where Biblical historians conclude John the Baptist baptized Jesus in the Jordan River. I looked across into the horizon, to the spot where our tour guide had pointed out Jerusalem and Jericho to Stephen and I just the day before. I was thinking how amazing it was for little ol’ me to be looking over some of the most historical and controversial places in human history. And then suddenly my right foot hit something, jarring the already damaged nail on my big toe. So maybe a Higher Power was telling me, yeah, it’s nice to realize where you are, but right now you have to focus on the race and watch where you are going! I looked down to see what my foot had hit and managed to dodge the next metal block just in time. Instead of rubble strips, the Jordanian transportation folks cement these metal blocks in several long rows to get folks to slow down. I spent the next few kilometers watching out for random metal blocks.

After I turned the corner at Bethany and started heading down to the Dead Sea for the last 12 km, a group of mountain bikers appeared on the race course. Now, remember, the road was supposedly closed to all traffic. There were soldiers and cops all long the course to keep cars off the road. Yeah, a few cars made it past, and I heard stories later of runners having to dodge them. But dodging cars was nothing compared to those bikers. They began to ride in and out of the runners, chasing runners down and cutting runners off. The cops and soldiers just stood by and watched. One British runner even complained to a cop that a biker hit him from behind and that he was then attacked by the biker’s group. I couldn’t believe the brush-off attitude the cop had. The British runner kept slowly moving on, mumbling about filling a complaint with the race officials.

As I dodged bikers for those last 10 km, I passed a few of the slow half marathon and 10k walkers. The pain in my quads and feet had become intense. I started watching for Stephen. The race course ran right by our hotel. I had told him that he had to come out of the hotel and walk up the course at least a little way. In other words, he couldn’t just wait in front of the hotel for me to pass. I am proud to say he actually walked up the course about 1 km which was actually about 3 km from the finish. I threw my hip pack to him, happy to be rid of that weight, and we walked together a short distance. He told me the time, and I realized I was actually moving pretty good considering the difficulty of the course.

The last 3 km to the finish was a nice break from the long downhill. Rolling hills made the leg muscles turn over a bit and feel less like jelly. Unfortunately, there was one last steep 10 meters downhill about 200 meters before the finish line. I said not nice things.

I finished in 4 hours, 45 minutes, and can wear my t-shirt proudly. But I don’t think I need to run the Dead Sea Marathon again. The story, however, is not over yet. When Stephen and I got back to Kuwait, we called my folks back home to tell them tales of the race. But my father had one better. While Stephen and I enjoyed Jordan, the old man managed to trip on a sidewalk during his daily shuffle. He landed directly on his jaw, breaking it in three places. Thus, it’s eating through a straw for a bunch of weeks for the guy who got me addicted to these dumb races to begin with. So two lessons of recent events are (1) never sign up for an all downhill marathon and (2) always pick up your feet when running! Oh, and another lesson: never go swimming in the Dead Sea, probably the saltiest body of water on the planet, after extensively chaffing your lower regions by running a marathon.

ENDS JUSTIFY THE MEANS?

The ends justified the means. That is the rationale being advanced by former Vice President Dick Cheney and others for the use of what was in essence torture in those first years of the War on Terror. The nation was vulnerable. Little was known about the identity, intentions, and capabilities of the enemy. Speed in closing the knowledge gap was imperative, so imperative that extraordinary, unpleasant means were necessary. The ends justified the means.

Ironically, it was not so long ago that the United States was on the other side of an ends justified the means rationale. That previous time also involved a war with an odd name. War on Terror, meet the Cold War.

For more than four decades in the Twentieth Century, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were the leading antagonists in a struggle for the future of mankind. The United States was the champion of individual freedoms and private sector capitalism. The USSR was the champion of Communism, an ideology based on the supremacy of the group—the state—in social, cultural, and economic arenas.

In the early decades of this struggle, the advantage seemed to many observes to lie with the USSR. In the economic field, the field that provides the populace with food, clothing, and shelter, the idea of a centrally planned economy impressed those observers as much more efficient than messy, unorganized capitalism. Early Soviet successes in the space race—the first satellite, Sputnik, in orbit in 1957 and the first man in orbit in 1961—were cited as evidence of the superiority of the economic component of the Communist system.

But even many who thought central planning superior to free market capitalism did not jump onboard the Communist bandwagon. A major reason was embodied in a common belief in the anti-Communist world: the ends did not justify the means. If a more efficient economic system required that the freedoms of the individual be curtailed, then a more efficient economic system was not worth the price.

Of course, in the later years of the Cold War, most notably during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, the efficiency of Communism’s economic component was exposed as a chimera. Central economic planning as attempted in the USSR turned out to be downright inefficient, indeed a failure.

Nevertheless, the belief that the ends do not justify the means was a major rallying concept for those opposed to Communism, particularly in the early years of the Cold War. For some, the belief was probably rooted in religion. For others, the concept was likely an expression of a moral code that ranked individual freedoms high and resisted their curtailment. For still others, the origin might have been no more than a gut reaction, a product of genetic heritage in a nation founded in rebellion against tyranny.

Perhaps the depth of the ends-do-not-justify-means belief in the nation’s soul explains the anguish many citizens feel about an explanation for torture that the ends did indeed justify the means. Or maybe it is the ease, and indeed alacrity, with which the justification was apparently embraced by the Bush Administration. The legal opinions and memoranda released in the last few days give little evidence of a struggle over broad issues of morality, of right and wrong. Instead, the papers are dominated by dry discussions of details, procedures, and alleged safeguards. One reads the material and wonders, did the authors not have any doubts about the end justifying the means?

Put another way, the released material does little more than assume that the end justified the means. Making the subjects of interrogations physically and mentally uncomfortable, even fearful, was the accepted intermediate objective on the path to the next objective, which was meaningful intelligence. The challenge was interpreting treaties, statutes, and precedents in such a way as to reach that intermediate objective of a terrorist willing to talk.

Former Vice President Cheney and his supporters cite yet-to-be released documents describing plots foiled as proof that the ends justified the means. It’s a safe bet that if these documents are released, not everyone will find such clarity. And the troublesome question will remain: did anyone at any point attempt a meaningful examination of whether the ends justified the means, or was that just assumed from the start by all involved, from the Decider on down?

CRANKY NEEDS HIS AU PAIR

Last week, while running, jogging, shuffling, or whatever it is he does at his advanced age, Cranky took a spill. Cranky has been pounding the pavement for forty years, and spills have not been uncommon, maybe three or four a year. In the past, the result was no more than skinned knees and bruised hands. But this time was different. Maybe his reactions are slower, maybe he was just overdue, but this time Cranky’s first point of contact with the ground was his chin.

The event occurred in a neighborhood populated mostly by folks from nations to the south. Perhaps uncertainty about customs in their new home explains why no one rushed to aid an old Gringo in shorts crumpled on the sidewalk. In any case, Cranky eventually pulled himself up and staggered home.

A four-hour visit to the ER determined that Cranky had cracked his jaw in three places. An oral surgeon pronounced that the jaw needed to be wired shut.

So the next day, after blood had stopped flowing and things had stabilized a bit, Cranky was back at the oral surgeon’s. The last thing he remembers is a needle going into his arm.

Well, the procedure was done but Cranky was still out cold. His wife and a nurse got him into the car for the trip home. There, his wife and two neighbors maneuvered him from the car into the house.

At this point, Cranky began to regain consciousness. His first memory is standing in his living room trying to make a desire known to his wife and the two neighbors: “AUF PUFF, AUF PUFF!”

The onlookers were perplexed.

“Upstairs, do you want to go upstairs?”

“Do you want something to drink?”

“I think he wants to lay down.”

But they weren’t comprehending Cranky’s need: “AUF PUFF, AUF PUFF!”

Finally, Cranky attempted graphics. With his hands, he traced an hourglass shape in the air in front of him: “AUF PUFF, AUF PUFF!”

Someone understood: “He wants an au pair!”

Yes, Cranky wanted an au pair to help in his recovery, preferably young and Scandinavian, but really, any nationality would do. Having made his need known, Cranky returned to unconsciousness.

WHAT THE GRAPH IS TELLING US

Specifically, the graph in the previous post shows that since sometime in the 1980s financial assets in the U.S. economy have grown faster than U.S. Gross Domestic Product. The beginning of this faster growth by financial assets coincided with the proliferation of computers. The Information Age is a term often applied to our computer-dependent society, and a variety of sources suggest the 1970-90 time frame as the beginning of the Information Age.

Thus one might conclude that the acceleration in the growth of financial assets over the last 20 years has been due to computers and is a byproduct of the Information Age. How have computers accelerated the growth of financial assets? First, computers facilitated the construction of complex, multi-layered financial products. Where there had once been a one-to-one ratio between a tangible asset--such as a house--and an intangible asset--in the case of the house, the mortgage held by a financial institution--there now could be a one-to-many ratio. The financial institution holding the mortgage could combine it with other mortgages to produce another financial asset, which could be sold to investors or other financial institutions, who could repeat the process. The total amount of financial assets grew faster than the amount of tangible assets supporting them.

The second way computers might have accelerated the growth of financial assets is similar but does not involve such an obvious pyramiding effect. Computers exponentially increased both the ability to create new financial assets and to process existing financial assets. The sheer increase in speed may have resulted in an increase in quantity.

But the graph suggests not just that the accelerated growth of financial assets to 2007 was a byproduct of the Information Age. What has transpired since? A financial debacle. So the graph suggests this causation trail: computers, accelerated growth of financial assets, financial debacle.

In other words, it's all the fault of computers.

WHAT STORY IS THIS GRAPH TELLING?

APOSTLES AND TROJANS

A long, long time ago, many decades before he qualified for Medicare, Cranky attended elementary, junior high, and high school, in that order. The school he attended was a small Catholic school. Cranky wasn’t a Catholic. In fact, his mother was a staunch Episcopalian, meaning she attended church regularly but mostly out of habit and because at that time and place it was expected. But she was staunch.

Why Cranky (incidentally, he wasn’t called Cranky at the time) ended up at a Catholic school was never clear, but Cranky pretty much liked it. His relationships with the good nuns who ran the place were mostly positive. He has none of those memories of a ruler across the knuckles or over the skull that many others apparently have. And the school’s small size enabled Cranky to participate in sports to a much greater degree than if he had been at the substantially larger public school, which had bona fide jocks. Actually, “sports” is a misnomer because there was only one sport, basketball. But it was enough for Cranky, who in his high school years lived, slept, and ate b-ball. Well, maybe not ate, but you get the picture.

There was only one downside to the situation: the team’s name. The team was called the Apostles. It was bad enough playing at other Catholic schools, none of which saw the need to be so blatant in calling attention to their religious connections. Playing at a public school Cranky found downright embarrassing. Fortunately, the name was not on the basketball uniforms. Unfortunately, the Apostles’ cheerleaders saw to it that no one was ignorant of who the team looked to for inspiration:

Everywhere we go
People want to know
Who we are
So we tell them
We are the Apostles
Mighty, mighty Apostles

Cranky eventually graduated, moving on to a life involving some things of which the good nuns would approve, and some things otherwise. His ties with the locale of his youth were not cut completely, but they were intermittent and tenuous. So it was only in the last few years that Cranky learned the Apostles were no more. Sometime in the intervening years, the name had been changed. The Apostles are now the Trojans.

That’s right, the Trojans.

Certainly, Trojans is a name found in the sports world, the Trojans of the University of Southern California, for example. But if you were picking a name for your team in this day and age, would you really pick Trojans?

Cranky wishes he had the story on how the Apostles became the Trojans. Perhaps someday he will do a little research. In the meantime, the questions hang in the air. Were the good nuns so clueless as to not be aware of all the implications of the new name? Was the PTA too embarrassed to tell them? Or were the girls and particularly boys on the teams given a little too much freedom and input, leading them to one of those jokes that youngsters have been known to play on their elders?

WELCOME TO THE INFORMATION AGE

The current financial mess just might be the first large-scale disaster of the Information Age. Why? Because the fundamental cause of the crisis—setting aside, of course, human greed—is the tool that ushered in and is synonymous with the Information Age, the computer. The computer has given us great analytical power, increasing exponentially our computational capabilities. But it has also increased exponentially our ability to create mischief, much of it inadvertent, but mischief nevertheless.

What has been the computer’s role in the financial meltdown? At the center of finance are the concepts of return, risk, and leverage. Participants in the financial marketplace want a return on their money. They want to understand the risk involved. And they often use leverage, or debt, to increase the return, but at the expense of an increase in risk.

As a result of the computer, the tradeoffs and relationships among return, risk, and leverage have become increasingly difficult to understand. Megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, bytes almost without end, can be fed into the computer and massaged in an infinite number of ways. Data and assumptions can produce models, which in turn can produce predictions. The data, assumptions, models, and predictions can be pyramided upon one another to produce still more models and predictions. The process has few meaningful constraints.

The complexity enabled by the computer has made financial instruments and the strategies for trading them opaque in the extreme. The assets represented by a security might be a bundle of other securities, each of which might in turn be backed by its own bundle. At the bottom of this multilayered concoction might finally be assets representing ownership of something “real,” such as mortgage loans. In constructing a bundle, Wall Street’s financial engineers often sliced and diced the component assets into groups, called tranches by the professionals, of allegedly different degrees of risk. One result of all the bundling, layering, slicing, and dicing is that the determination of an accurate value for the resulting security has proven to be little more than guesswork.

Another result is that as financial assets were created and pyramided upon one another, the fundamental economic structure of the nation, and the world, changed. Financial assets, which include the whole range of financial products from the basic savings account, to stocks, to the most complex asset-backed security, came to comprise a much greater proportion of the economy. For example, in 1980 financial assets in the U.S. economy amounted to $13.9 trillion, or five times the gross domestic product. At the end of 2007, financial assets totaled $141.9 trillion, which was over ten times GDP. Considered another way, the annual average growth of GDP from 1981 to 2007 was 6.1 percent; the annual average growth of financial assets was 9.1 percent.

A more common group of statistics used to show the shift in the structure of the economy concerns debt. Debt, of course, is also a financial asset, a financial asset to the lending party. For the period 1981 to 2007 when GDP was growing at an annual average of 6.1 percent, total domestic debt was growing an annual average of 9.2 percent.

ROLE OF PATENTS

Evidence that the computer has increased the gap between the financial world and our understanding of it can be found at a place that at first glance seems odd: the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The USPTO issues patents not only for tangible things but also for a variety of intangibles, many of which fall under the rubric of “business methods.” How these controversial business methods patents came about is a story in itself, a story that is ongoing but that is well beyond subject at hand. Suffice it to say that some patents issued for business methods support the assertion that the computer, the foundation of the Information Age, is not a totally benign instrument.

Remember Lehman Brothers? Its failure last September brought the growing financial problems front and center. Like many organizations in contemporary high finance, Lehman Brothers had been assigned patents for financial “inventions.” Presumably, Lehman Brothers and its fellow patentees were proud of their “inventions.” One of Lehman’s patents, issued in August 2007, was entitled “Methods and Systems for Analyzing and Predicting Market Winners and Losers.” The patent involved massaging, with a computer program, performance and volume data for securities. Perhaps this particular computer program wasn’t quite up to snuff, eh Lehman?

In December 2007, JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., whose parent would rescue Bear Stearns a few months later, received a patent for a computer-implemented financial model involving asset-backed commercial paper. The model produced lower estimates of the liquidity—backup cash—allegedly needed to support a portfolio of assets financed in the commercial paper market. But insufficient liquidity has proven to be central to the current economic troubles. Some patent, huh JP?

Other notable Wall Street denizens that hold patents on alleged computerized improvements to high finance include Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Barclays Bank, and Credit Suisse First Boston. Big name Wall Street firms are not the only players. For example, IBM has a patent for a method to analyze financial derivatives. The Trustees of Columbia University have a patent for providing “Robust” investment portfolios. Indeed, with business methods patents in the financial field as sources, a decent history of the current financial predicament could be attempted.

The problem would be comprehending those sources. The patents are rife with dense mathematical and statistical jargon. For example, IBM’s patent for analyzing financial instruments describes a process involving the calculation of first and second density functions, calculus integration, and “a convex superposition of mutually-translated delta functions.”

Incidentally, IBM does not really like business methods patents, having railed against them on a number of occasions. But for defensive reasons Big Blue plays the game, and does so quite well.

The point is not to blame the world’s current financial difficulties on patents. The patents are just evidence of how the enormous computational power of the computer has been used to construct a financial system that we mere mortals do not understand and that is now crumbling.

Welcome to the Information Age. What’s next on the agenda?

VIRGINIANS AND GIBBERISH

Virginians used to have an extraordinary facility with the English language. There was Thomas Jefferson, who wrote, among other things, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

And there was Patrick Henry, who succinctly stated “Give me Liberty or give me Death.”

And there was even Henry Howell, who castigated the monied powers with “Keep the Big Boys honest.”

Do any Virginians today have a comparable grasp of language? If any do, they are not to be found in the state legislature or Department of Taxation. For several years, Virginia taxpayers have had to deal with something called Special Fixed Date Conformity adjustments. A simple description of exactly what those are, or of the concept behind them, has not been provided, at least in any place that is readily evident.

Then there is the AFAGI, or adjusted federal adjusted gross income. This is defined on page 9 of the 2008 Virginia 760 Resident Individual Income Tax Booklet as “the taxpayer’s federal adjusted gross income, modified for any fixed date conformity adjustments, and reduced by any taxable Social Security and Tier 1 Railroad Benefits.”

Virginia, how far she has fallen.

HE KEPT US SAFE

Defenders of W, the outgoing President, 43, Bush 2, Cheney’s mouthpiece, say that whatever his mistakes, at least he kept us safe.

This is ludicrous. Whoever happened to be President on September 11, 2001, would have “kept us safe.” Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Bill Clinton, Elmer Fudd (wait, he was President), any semi-competent individual would have “kept us safe.” The world changed on that day. Domestic security didn’t just step up a notch, it expanded exponentially. And it would have done so no matter who was in charge.

You think George was the only guy or gal under whom you would be taking off your shoes in order to board a plane? You think only George perceived the need to increase border security, to better monitor potential domestic terrorists, to make the CIA talk to the FBI?

Who was the enemy on September 11? A bunch of guys with box cutters who took over airplanes and crashed them into buildings. This tactic didn’t even survive until noon on that awful day, and it wasn’t George who led the way in countering it. A handful of citizens on the fourth hijacked plane gave their lives, but they prevented their plane from being used as a missile. The box cutter-airplane-building tactic worked for a few hours one morning, but a repeat is unlikely.

Would another President’s expanded domestic security program have taken a different shape? At the margins, certainly. And with more concern about Constitutional niceties, hopefully. But anyone who thinks things would have returned to pre-9/11 conditions has a screw loose. Whoever the President, a massive expansion of domestic security programs would have occurred, and their short-term success would have been very probable.

The world remains an unsafe place. The real dangers are not guys with box cutters but guys with nukes or germs. Preventing the bad guys from getting their hands on these types of weapons is the challenge for the years and decades ahead.

In the domestic security field, W deserves credit for doing his job, for doing what any competent individual in that position would have done. But implying that he did something extraordinary is nonsense

SO WHERE HAS CRANKY BEEN?

So where has Cranky been? Well, he’s been on Sabbatical. He observed that election we just came through. And he watched his modest investments become his pathetic investments. And he attempted to offset his financial decline through a new profession: document reviewer. And he contemplated the meaning of it all.

As for the election, wasn't it great how the party of self-righteousness, narrow-mindedness, incompetence, and anti-intellectualism got its comeuppance? I mean really, the Republican party of today is not the broad tent of Cranky's youth, which was back in the 1950s. Maybe the defeat will help it find itself and reconnect with the center of American society, culture, and economics.

Concerning the financial turmoil, the important question is, have we reached the bottom? That is also the unanswerable question. How did we get here? Well how about greed, ideological rigidity on the part of a sizeable portion of the nation's leadership, and stupidity? Wait, weren't similar characteristics in the preceding paragraph?

And document review? This is the unpleasant underbelly of the legal profession. It is a product of the computer age. Computers may have eliminated a tiny bit of paperwork, but their electronic records have made up the difference and added exponentially more garbage to the world. So big legal cases require worker bees to wade through hundreds of thousands—even millions—of assorted computer detritus: emails, memoranda, spreadsheets, whatall. The worker bees are an eclectic group of recent law school graduates, part-timers, between-jobbers, trying-to-find-themselves’ers, retirees, and other assorted riff-raff. They sit at computer terminals on long tables, supervised by young lawyers talented enough to get hired by a big time law firm but inexperienced enough to barely have a clue. But the pay ain’t bad, the jobs are temporary, and you get to see how the upper crust lives.

As for the meaning of it all, maybe another Sabbatical is in order.

THINGS THE CANDIDATES SHOULD STOP SAYING

McCain:

“My friends.” I ain’t your friend, John. I’m just a cranky old man like you.

“Maverick.” James Garner was Maverick. Tom Cruise was Maverick (in Top Gun). You just have trouble getting along with your peers.

Obama:

“I’ll go through the federal budget line-by-line.” No you won’t. You have a whole bureaucracy for that, the Office of Management and Budget. Stop making the federal government sound simple. It ain’t and never will be.

“Deregulation caused our problems.” No it didn’t. The sectors of the financial industry that caused our problems—investment banks, hedge funds, private equity funds, mortgage brokers—weren’t deregulated. They couldn’t have been because they were never subject to much regulation in the first place.

Biden:

“I’m from the heartland of America, Scranton, Pennsylvania.” With all due respect to Scranton, we’ve gotta have a better heartland than that.

Palin:

Everything. The voice, the inflections, the dropped gs, remind us of (1) the movie Fargo and (2) the current droppin' gs President, and ya betcha ya know where he has taken us.

WHO GETS LEHMAN'S PATENTS?

Okay, Lehman Brothers, a premier investment bank, a venerable Wall Street institution, a key component of the nation’s financial system for over a century, has gone belly up. Now the question is, who gets its patents.

Patents!? What patents would a company that deals in intangibles—stocks, bonds, advice, financial derivatives whose acronyms span the alphabet—have? Aren’t patents limited to things you can touch, feel, get an electrical shock from? Well, my friends, if that is your view of patents, you are so 20th Century.

Today, the United States Patent and Trademark Office grants patents for fuzzy, nebulous things like tax strategies; and financial securities that are just a little bit different than existing financial securities; and systems for, allegedly, making money in the buying and selling of stocks, bonds, and other financial products, including the goofy ones that have contributed to our present troubles.

Last year, In July, Lehman was assigned patent 7,249,083. The subject of this patent is “a novel investment vehicle for increasing the flexibility of select convertible bonds and other equity-linked securities.” The description contained in the patent is convoluted in the extreme and if the subject of a U.S. Supreme Court case could easily result in nine separate opinions. But the essence seems to be a debt instrument that, upon the happening of various contingencies, the purchaser could convert into an equity security that the issuer in turn would have an option to purchase.

Sort of a heads I win, tails you lose thing.

The next month, August 2007, Lehman was assigned patent 7,263,502 for a method of selecting winners and losers based on their market positions. The method used a “volume/turnover filter” that would supposedly enable investors to predict “when to hold some stocks long and others short over various time period[s], thereby maximizing the profitability of a portfolio.”

Maybe you should have used it yourself, Lehman.

And in December 2007, Lehman was assigned patent 7,310,618 for a method of creating a loan delinquency database. The method involves the massaging of historical loan data and various factors concerning loans to arrive at probabilities of delinquencies. The description in the patent asserts that the method “simplifies the underwriting of . . . sub-prime loans.”

Immortal words, those.

Although granted in 2007, the applications for these patents had been filed much earlier, in the years 2000 to 2004, suggesting that the methods and systems described had been in use for some time.

Lehman Brothers is by no means the only financial firm with patents on financial practices that have turned out to be dubious at best. The list of others includes Goldman Sachs & Co., JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., and good ol’ Freddie Mac. The troubled Washington Mutual, Inc., even has a patent, 6,681,985, for the arrangement of furniture and equipment, including the provision of “kid’s area,” in a branch office.

Many of these patents are called business methods patents, and the growth in their numbers can be traced to the 1998 State Street decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (State Street Bank & Trust Company v. Signature Financial Group, Inc.). For the financial industry, these patents provide evidence of the muddled thinking, grand expectations, poor oversight, and outright greed that have brought Wall Street to its knees.

For the U.S. patent system, business methods patents are a beloved child who is growing into a rampaging, out-of-control teenager. The Patent Office contends that it does not grant patents for computer software, but a large proportion of business methods patents contain little more than software. Tweak a bit of existing software and you have a new patent.

The good news, at least for those who think the patent system needs reining in, is that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard an important case on the matter in May. The case was In re Bilski, and the patent was for a method enabling energy consumers to hedge risk. A decision is expected anytime, and commentators in the patent field say the court will likely narrow the field of what may be patented.

And as for Lehman’s patents? The financial system might be better off if they join Lehman Brothers in Potter’s Field.

LIPSTICK ON A PIG

This lipstick on a pig thing has gotten out of hand. To recap, in her speech before the Country Club (Republican) convention, Sarah Palin aroused the audience and much of the right wing media, some apparently sexually, by saying that the only difference between hockey moms and pit bulls was lipstick.

Then Barack Obama gave a speech in which he listed the many ways in which John McCain is trying to resell failed or questionable Country Club (Republican) positions and policies. Obama finished with an oft used analogy: trying to pretty up the failed and questionable policies from the past is like putting lipstick on a pig, a phrase, by the way, that John McCain has himself used on occasion.

Country Clubbers (Republicans) gleefully countered by charging that Obama was making a derogatory reference to Sarah Palin. The Obama campaign has of course denied that.

But instead of being defensive the Obama people, in the opinion of the Cranky Old Guy, should go on the offense. Here’s a suggestion for a new campaign ad.

Clip 1: Sarah Palin is making one of her cute statements that has turned out to be inaccurate at best; for example, the statement that she rejected Congress’s attempt to fund the bridge to nowhere when in fact she was for it initially and only became against it after Congress had already turned thumbs down.

Clip 2: John McCain is shown making one of his lipstick on a pig statements.

Clip 3: Another of Sarah’s half-truths is shown, such as her implication that she disposed of the Alaskan Governor’s plane on ebay.

Clip 4: John McCain utters another lipstick on a pig statement.

Clip 5: Another Sarah half-truth.

Clip 6: Another John McCain lipstick on a pig.

Clip 7: “I’m Barack Obama and I approve this message.”

And that’s how Cranky would put lipstick on a pig.

HAIRCUT

Every now and then—actually, quite frequently—Cranky is reminded how the culture is passing him by. The latest reminder occurred recently at a barber shop.

You remember barber shops, right? Those places with red and white poles outside where guys go to get haircuts? That is, unless you’re the kind of guy that goes to a “hair stylist” place.

Cranky has always thought that things were pretty simple at a barber shop. The barber asked how you wanted it cut. You replied with something like, “Just a trim,” or maybe “Medium.”

Sometimes the barber might asked, “Tapered in back?” Cranky has never known quite sure what that meant, so he always answered “Yes.” And then after electric clippers on the sides and back and some scissors action, you were done. You felt some haircuts were better than others, but they were all mostly okay. Very infrequently, maybe once a decade, you thought the result was really odd, and family and friends snickered a bit, but new growth soon returned you to a familiar state.

So for most of Cranky’s life, barber shops have been places of stability in a world of bewildering change. The stability hasn’t been absolutely complete. For example, female barbers are much more numerous nowadays—a welcomed development, in Cranky’s view—but for the most part the barber shop of today is not much different than the barber shop of yesteryear.

Thus Cranky was not prepared for what transpired during his most recent trip to the barber shop. Shortly after Cranky was seated and bibbed up, another patron took an adjacent chair. The barber asked, “How do you want it?”

Which was the trigger for a dissertation. “Just clippers on the side except for ‘round the ears where scissors only. And scissors only on the top. Go easy on the neck shave in back. And just light scissors on the sideburns. Don’t shave below them.”

What the heck!? Cranky stole a look sideways. He was a youngish dark-haired dude with one of those spiked hair situations. Not a multitude of spikes, just a small one in front. Late thirties at the most, he looked at the peak of his game, a master of the universe. All success thus far. Life had not gotten around to those kicks in the groin.

The real question was, what was he doing in a barber shop? Hair stylist was where he belonged, pure and simple. “Hey Dude, this place is for us ancient types. There’s a fru-fru joint down the block, just the thing for you and other pretty boys, like John Edwards.”

TIMES ARE HARD AND YOU'RE NOT

In recent radio advertisements in the Washington, D.C., area, a local erectile dysfunction clinic has found in the troubled financial situation a reason to seek the clinic’s services. The advertisement says that in these difficult times, you need “intimacy” more than ever. The unspoken follow on is that apparently you can’t have “intimacy” without a great big throbbing, well, you get the picture.

So how about some other ad slogans linking the economy and ED:

Times are hard and you’re not.

Need a new stimulus package?

Are you as soft as the economy?

The job market isn’t the only thing shriveling up.

Mortgage loans and you: both subprime.

Shafted: the economy yes, you no.

The economy limps along, and you’re just limp.

The difference between you and the stock market? The stock market occasionally rises.

You and your portfolio, both shrinking.

Interest rates rise, interest rates fall. You just fall.

WORST FLUSH PERCENTAGE

Over the last year and a half, Cranky has had four different jobs. It's not that Cranky can't hold down a position, it's just that. . .well, it's complicated.

Anyway, the four jobs mean that Cranky was in four different workplaces. Being the observant guy he is, Cranky discerned that things were not always the same. One thing that was different among the four workplaces was lavatories.

Lavatories can be measured in various ways. For example, for a given system of commodes over a given period of time, what is the flush percentage? If a system has five commodes and they are all five operable for the whole period of time, the system has a flush percentage of 100 percent. If one commode is out for the whole period, the system has a flush percentage of 80 percent. If three commodes are each out for one-half the period, the system has a flush percentage of 70 percent (Cranky thinks this calculation is correct, but you’d better check the math.)

The last place Cranky worked had one commode for about forty users. One might expect that this many users would result in a significantly low flush percentage (and in forty uncomfortable individuals.)

But such was not the case. This commode took all that was dropped and kept right on flushing.

No, the place with the worst flush percent was an office building of, drum roll please, the United States Senate. In spite of surrounding walls, ceilings, and floors of first rate material—stone, fine tile—and top-of-the-line models, Senate commodes seemed to spend a lot of time just fermenting noxious nastiness.

A wiseacre might be tempted to say that with such a concentration of BS, no wonder the Senate commodes were constantly clogging up. But Cranky is not a wiseacre.

PREACHERS AND POLITICS

One beneficial result of the brouhahas caused by some religious leaders over recent weeks and months just might be a lower role for men (and women) of the cloth in the political arena. For some years now, words from at least a few pulpits have had a decidedly secular tinge. Yes, the ostensible theme may have been how to achieve eternal salvation. But the means have included the proper stances on political issues, and political figures.

Concerning religion, the First Amendment to the Constitution is often described as mandating the separation of church and state. But the specific language is a little more one-sided: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Note that the prohibitions are directed at Congress. Nothing in the First Amendment explicitly prevents religions and their adherents from seeking to impose their views on government. On some questions, the views may coincide with those of many other citizens. On other questions, however, a position pushed by a religion and its adherents may not be much evident in other elements of the population.

Moreover, nothing in the First Amendment explicitly prevents political pronouncements, economic theories, diatribes, rants, absurdities, and whatall from the pulpit. Many citizens, whether church goers or not, may have been unaware that from a few pulpits strange words are heard, and that in a few pulpits are strange individuals, narcissistic, self-absorbed, playing to the crowd.

The exposure of such words and individuals to the judgment of a broader audience could tarnish somewhat the halo that a few religious leaders have attempted over the years to wear around the political arena. To be more explicit, Preachers are like the rest of us: some good, some bad, some rational, some not. If such long time political evangelists as the departed Jerry Falwell and the still with us Pat Robertson are seen not as just a step removed from the mainstream but as just a step removed from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, more people might be less inclined to accord them and their views respect.

JOHN McCAIN, PLEASE STOP TALKING LIKE THAT

John, you have got to stop talking like last century. Most recently, you said something to the effect “I will never surrender in Iraq.”

Hey John, there is nobody to surrender to in Iraq! It is not that kind of war. You and the guy you want to replace keeping talking about victory, surrender, and other things that just don’t apply to the situation. If we left Iraq tomorrow, hook, line, and sinker, not leaving a single American soldier, it would not be surrender. We would just be quitting. Maybe not a good thing to do, but surrendering is not what it would be.

Here’s the problem, John. A good number of Americans, probably at this point most Americans, realize Iraq is not a World War II kind of war. Whatever the ending is, there is not gonna be a peace treaty signed on the battleship Missouri as the Navy stages one humongous flyover. For years, probably decades, and maybe even centuries, Iraq, and indeed the whole Middle East, will continue to be one messy place.

Democracy as we understand it in the U.S.? Forget it. Stability? Precarious at best. Our goal in Iraq and the Middle East should be modest: keeping the lid on as the people, hopefully, mature politically.

John, if you keep talking like a George Bush clone you will get the votes of a certain hardcore constituency. But I would be plenty surprised if the World War II era talk gets you to the White House.

You are a bona fide American hero, John. But being a hero doesn’t mean you have an understanding of what makes the world tick.

CONSERVATIVES & LIBERALS

At their best, conservatives want the status quo.

At their worst, conservatives want yesterday’s status quo.

At their best, liberals want a better tomorrow.

At their worst, liberals want a perfect tomorrow.

TORTURE, PUNISHMENT, AND GUNS

To have a successful blog, the blogger should be up bright and early. She or he should exhaustively peruse news and commentary sources. Then she or he should pound out her or his thoughts, opinions, and whatall.

Cranky is much too lazy for all this. He’s usually up late. He does peruse news and commentary sources, but it takes him most of the day. And only occasionally does he burden you with his thoughts. (Be thankful for small favors.)

All of this is by way of explaining why Cranky is just getting around to commenting on an event that occurred a couple of weeks ago. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes. Among the subjects that intellectual giant Leslie Stahl discussed with Honorable Antonin was the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the amendment that prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Honorable Antonin contended that the Eighth Amendment does not necessarily prohibit torture because torture is not necessarily punishment. Pulling fingernails to make some alleged terrorist spill his guts is apparently just trying to get information; it is not punishment.

Talk about nitpicking on the meaning of words. Honorable Antonin is definitely one heckuva nitpicker.

Okay, but if you’re gonna be a nitpicker, you should nitpick all the way. For example, let’s take another Constitutional Amendment, the Second, you know, the one that says the right to bear arms shall not be abridged. Here's the nitpick. Strictly construed, really strictly construed, “arms” should have the meaning it had at the time the Amendment was adopted. And at that time, the meaning was ye olde musket.

So the Second Amendment permits you to have all the muskets you want. But forget about that AK-47, or even that .22.

Some might contend that Cranky’s reasoning is defective. His Second Amendment interpretation is a time warp thing, which is different that Honorable Antonin’s torture is not punishment thing. But Cranky contends that at the heart of both arguments is nitpicking in the extreme. If you’re gonna pick a nit between torture and punishment, you should be consistent and pick a nit over the meaning of “arms.”

Back to you, Antonin.

PROFOUND QUESTIONS OF LIFE #1

Do women still use bobby pins?

ALBATROSS DEBATE

Hillary Clinton’s call for an unmoderated debate between her and Barack Obama is at least intriguing. And it might really, finally be a debate with substantial substance. We certainly need something better than that last pathetic effort overseen by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. The media have become much too part of the story.

But a much more interesting debate might be between the campaign albatrosses: Hillary’s albatross Bill and Barack’s albatross Jeremiah.

For you people unfamiliar with the albatross thing (asleep in senior English, eh?), the metaphor, allusion, or whatever, refers, according to Wikipedia (yeah, Wikipedia, you got a problem with that) to an encumbrance, or a wearisome burden. The origin of the concept is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In the poem, the mariner (refers to a guy on a ship) shoots an albatross with a crossbow. Then all kinds of bad things happen; so the negative concept of having an albatross hanging from one’s neck.

Get it now? Bill is Hillary’s albatross, and Jeremiah is Barack’s albatross.

Wouldn’t that be a heck of a debate? Two more articulate guys are hard to find. And two more perfect albatrosses. Jeremiah could spout his gibberish about religion, his evil homeland, and whatall, and Bill could vent his rage at the fact that he can’t be President anymore.

MILITARY TALKING HEADS

In this past Sunday’s edition of The New York Times (April 20, 2008), the military talking heads that have been clarifying the Iraqi excursion for us for the last five years were taken to task. The Times presented considerable evidence that many of them were not only faithful parrots of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld line but also eager participants in the lucrative business of defense contracting.

Military talking heads, of course, are the retired military generals, colonels, and lesser ranks who are the war “experts” on CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, and last but certainly not least, FOX.

Now the Cranky Old Guy has always been aware (meaning since he was cognizant of a world beyond his sandbox) of the military-industrial complex thing. He even remembers President Eisenhower’s speech on the subject. Or at least reading of the speech. Recently, he had the opportunity to see again “Why We Fight,” a PBS production of several years ago that, with Eisenhower’s speech as an introduction setting the theme, looked at the supportive, often incestuous relationship between the Pentagon, defense contractors, and Congress.

So Cranky is not naïve. And as a veteran he has even spent some time in the MI complex himself. But the Times article was really pretty startling. Not only did Rumsfled and his flunkies make a substantial, coordinated, and largely successful effort to coop the military talking heads. Many of those heads were receiving big bucks from the defense contracting establishment. Conflicts of interest? Apparently not enough that the TV mucky-mucks thought we should know about the possibility.

Some of the military talking heads allowed to the Times that they didn’t buy all the stuff they were briefed. But they largely kept their doubts out of their public comments.

And speaking of “briefed,” notice how central this concept has become in this PowerPoint age. PowerPoint briefings have become the principal way information is conveyed. A problem might be that PowerPoint simplifies far too much. Our ability to delve deep into complex situations, to grasp pros, cons, nuances, the big picture, and the details may be eroding.

Perhaps nowhere is the PowerPoint culture more deeply embedded than the military establishment. Congressional committees don’t usually permit witnesses to use PowerPoint. But blown up PowerPoint slides can become easel-size charts, and these charts are liberally allowed. In General David Petraeus’ recent appearances before Congress, he had a full bird Colonel putting charts on an easel and pointing out stuff as Petraeus talked (for you non-military types, a full bird Colonel is pretty high on the totem pole). And the Colonel had a Captain to hold the pointer when it wasn’t being used. They were both probably part of the 33rd PowerPoint Platoon (Airborne).

“He [or She] gives good brief” is the sign of an up and comer at the Pentagon. Iraq may be the first PowerPoint war. Helluva precedent.

COMPASSION FORUM

Cranky is reaching the end of his rope with this Presidential campaign. The twenty-four news cycle threatens to make us all imbeciles. Needing something new at the top of every hour, the talking heads hop on every malapropism, slip of the tongue, pick of the nose, scratch of the zit, sideways glance, and what all. A candidate’s every word and action is dissected, resected, and dissected again. A meandering thought becomes occasion for analysis akin to a Phd dissertation.

Occasionally, issues are discussed. Mostly though, the focus is on the superficial.

And it isn’t all the media’s fault. The candidates light into each other’s musings with the intensity and ferociousness a feral cat ripping into a song sparrow. To Hillary and Obama, John McCain’s off-hand comment about the possibility of being in Iraq for one hundred years becomes a major policy announcement. To Obama and John, Hillary’s war story embellishment reveals a fundamental character flaw. To John and Hillary, Obama’s unguarded comment about small-town America exposes a bigot’s inner soul.

Adding to the verbal cauldron is our man Bill. Up until the South Carolina primary, Bill was viewed by friend and foe alike as a political natural. You may not have liked him, you may have thought his morals a bit loose, but most acknowledged that he seemed a political genius.

Well, no more. In two short months Bill has shown that he can put his foot in his mouth with the best of them. If Hillary finds herself not her party’s nominee, she can give Bill much of the credit. Should make for an interesting phase of their unusual marriage.

But all this is prelude to Cranky’s thoughts of the moment. Tonight, CNN had what it called a Compassion Forum. In essence, the candidates were to be grilled on their personal religious beliefs. Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Mason, Monroe, and the other Founding Fathers would not have been pleased.

Cranky lasted only a few minutes. CNN’s Campbell Brown, that theological giant, started Hillary off with a question about the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Whaa! We’re electing a President, not Medieval Monk of the Year.

So six months still to go before the idiocy is over. This twenty-four news cycle stuff, this interconnectedness that has come to dominate our lives, can’t be for the better. Cranky doesn’t necessarily think the world as a whole is dumbing down. But in this information age, this electronic age, the lowest common denominator has become the standard in the public forum. Is this the future?

WAR STORIES

Okay, so Hillary Clinton told a whopper of a war story. She did not in fact run across the tarmac with her head down to avoid snipers. Her lie was contradicted by the video.

But as many veterans might admit if really pressed, war stories often stray from the basic facts. When described later in a calm setting, the basic facts do not capture the stress, tension, fear, and excitement the individual felt at the time. To convey what the individual felt, it is very tempting to add a few embellishments, and later a few more, and so on.

Put another way, the truth at the core of a war story often becomes obscured by the teller’s need to convey what the event meant to him or her.

The difficulty of sticking to the truth in war stories is a component problem of how we treat war in general. We easily mouth condemnations about the horrors of war, about the need to avoid war if at all possible. But we have considerable difficulty acknowledging the attractions of war and how those attractions can lead us to the very thing we profess to despise.

In his own unique, tactless, chilling way, President George W. Bush recently stumbled on the subject of wars’ attractions. In a call to U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan, the President waxed envious about how romantic it must be to chase bad guys in the mountainous wilds halfway around the world. The President wished he were younger so he could participate, sort of a wannabe war story. (Uh, Mr. President, didn’t you once have a chance for something similar? Okay, won’t go there.)

The presumptive Republican nominee for President, John McCain, who certainly has earned the right to tell bona fide war stories, indirectly chided the President by noting in a speech that there was nothing romantic about war.

So we have Hillary Clinton telling a whopper of a war story, George Bush with a wannabe war story, and John McCain seemingly contending that wars have no attractions for human beings. Which of the three mouthed the most dangerous words?

Ms. Clinton comes in last, the least dangerous pronouncement. Yes, she told a flagrant lie. The telling of the lie does not reflect well on her overall truthfulness. But her lie would not likely lead to a bad decision on national policy, to the commitment of American flesh and blood to some quixotic adventure.

Mr. McCain comes in second. By implying that war is all horror and no romantic adventure, he dismisses a cause of war: the seeking of that romantic adventure, either by our enemies or by us. This is not to say that war is never justified. It is justified on occasion, at least to most of us, but the justification should be thorough enough to remove the element of frolicking for fun in exotic lands.

In addition, if Mr. McCain is completely dismissing the attractions of war, one has to wonder about the motivation of three generations of McCains, career navy men all. Okay, so a career in the military does not necessarily imply a love of war. But it makes unequivocal expressions about a hatred of war a little hard to take.

Perhaps the ambivalence of the military man toward war was best captured by General Douglas MacArthur in his farewell address at West Point. After paying lip service to the desire for peace, he said:

I listen vainly for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns , the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

We want our military men both to hate war and to acknowledge its attractions.

Which brings us to the winner of the most dangerous words contest. The President’s words carry the opposite import of those of John McCain. The President talked of the romantic nature of war without much convincing talk of war’s horrors and brutality. And his words are not in a vacuum. He and like minded cohorts cavalierly took the nation to war in 2003. There was inadequate planning, inadequate thought about the future, inadequate attention to the consequences. There was just the romantic notion of bringing, by force or arms, freedom and democracy to the Middle East.

Unfortunately about war is the fact that its nastiness, dirtiness, horrors, brutality, and tragedy are partially offset by its romanticism. The nation needs a leader who recognizes and acknowledges the ambivalence and contradictions.

HILLARY'S TRACY FLICK MOMENT

The resemblance between Hillary Clinton and Tracy Flick has not gone unnoticed. Goggle Tracy Flick and various Hillary-related websites pop up. For those who don’t know Tracy Flick, she was the Reese Witherspoon character in the 1999 movie “Election.” And for those not familiar with “Election,” which also starred Matthew Broderick (Ferris Bueller), only watch it if you want to be reminded of your worst high school nightmares.

Every high school has a Tracy Flick or Flicks. She is the earnest, calculating, striving self-promoter who answers all the questions, dominates class discussions, and participates in more extracurricular activities than you can shake a stick at. She is a perennial mainstay of student government. She knows neither sarcasm nor cynicism. Her senior yearbook entry puts yours to shame. And she can just as well be a he as a she, but in our culture a female Tracy Flick is somehow the more common stereotype.

In the Ohio debate on Tuesday, February 27, Hillary had a Tracy Flick moment. Tim Russert started grilling Barack Obama about his endorsement by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, an individual with a long history of anti-Semitic statements. Obama said he had no contact with Farrakhan, had not solicited the endorsement, certainly did not agree with any of Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic remarks, and in fact denounced those remarks.

But Russert was not satisfied. He wanted to know if Barack specifically “rejected” Farrakhan’s endorsement. Barack was obviously having difficulty with the concept of “rejecting” an endorsement. What does “rejecting” something intangible mean? How does one go about it?

At this point, Hillary’s inner Tracy Flick felt compelled to explain the matter to Barack, and to the rest of us. She described at length how in her first Senate campaign in New York she had, at great political risk, “rejected” the support and endorsement of potential backers with anti-Semitic views. It was clear to her that Barack’s denunciation was not enough. An affirmative “rejection” was explicitly called for. The implication was that Barack had been tested and fallen short.

In just a few words, Barack defused the issue, took the wind out of Hillary’s and Tim’s sails, and probably gained the support of many who have bad memories of long ago smug corrections by a Tracy Flick. Barack said that he saw no difference between his denunciation and Hillary’s rejection, but if it made her happy, he would both “reject and denounce.” Too bad he didn’t add a “whatever.”

So there, Tracy, er Hillary.

CONGRESSIONAL CHART DOOFUS

Avid watchers of C-Span—and that would put you amongst a pretty weird group—may have caught a glimpse of the Cranky Old Guy recently. Due to a pretty convoluted set of circumstances, Cranky found himself as a Congressional Chart Doofus.

Now, the world doesn’t have many Chart Doofuses, and Congressional Chart Doofuses are an even rarer species. When members of the House or Senate speak on the floor of Congress, they don’t have any of the technological assistance that speakers in other environments rely upon. There is no PowerPoint, no video, nothing to acknowledge that the world is half a century or more into the information age. What there is, is big physical charts, maybe three feet by four feet. A chart may contain words, pictures, graphs, and the like.

The charts are put on easels as a legislator speaks. C-Span aficionados will have seen these easels and charts behind or to the side of speaking legislators. The individual who puts a chart on an easel at the appropriate moment in a legislator’s speech is known as a Chart Doofus.

Contrary to what one might think, Chart Doofusing is not an easy job.

For one thing, Chart Doofusing is like field goal kicking: you’re only as good as your last effort. Put a chart upside down, put up the wrong chart, not even having the correct chart at hand—such faux paxes can instantly erase the memory of dozens of successful, straight-through-the-uprights shots.

And for anyone other than a member of Congress, the floor of the House or Senate is an extremely authoritarian environment. A whole passel of disciplinarians is on hand to make sure lesser mortals do not walk, sit, whisper, scratch, or whatever in the wrong place. Screw up more than a couple of times and a Congressional Chart Doofus is seeking another line of work.

Cranky survived, barely, his bit of Chart Doofusing. But it’s not something he wants to make a habit of. And indeed it would be unwise to put old antiauthoritarian types like Cranky in such a public position. Cranky’s days of trying to work his way up a career ladder are long past. Right now, he’s just trying to pad his pension. So he wouldn’t have a whole lot to lose if he reacted to one of the disciplinarians by loudly saying, on C-Span, “Bite Me.”

TIME FOR BILL TO GO

Dear Hillary:

If you want to be President of these United States, you need to cut Bill loose. He has become a colossal distraction. His ranting and raving are not being well received. He cost you beaucoup votes in South Carolina. He has people asking, “I want to put up with his enormous ego for the next four years?”

So it’s time to say to him: “Bill, I let you get away with being serviced by the fat intern. But now you are standing between me and the Presidency. It’s splitsville time for us. My lawyers will be contacting your lawyers. It’s been real.”

Sincerely,
The Cranky Old Guy

CRANKY'S CHRISTMAS BLOG

Cranky has had a helluva year, and he thinks you should know about it. He never got into the writing of Christmas Letters, those long meandering tomes about what the family has done the past twelve months, but the internets, with all their interconnected tubes and stuff, give him another avenue of presentation.

Cranky’s year started with open heart surgery, his second such operation. At issue was a bad valve. No sweat for the docs: they opened Cranky up, sliced and diced, and were done by lunch. As for Cranky, he was a hospitalized zombie for close to a week, and then an agitated over-medicated basket case for three months. Restless leg syndrome? Cranky had it day and night. Sleep was an occasional thing.

While Cranky was recuperating, he was fired from his contract job editing stuff for some federal agency. Talk about hard-hearted.

So Cranky ended up training as a Patent Examiner for the U.S. Patent Office. One problem was that Cranky was in a training class whose instructor was an angry little guy from somewhere in Central Asia, which was also where Attila the Hun was from. Cranky hadn’t been yelled at that much since Army basic training some forty years ago.

The second problem was that Cranky’s field of patent applications was something called business methods patents. Talk about garbage. A patent is supposed to be about an invention, but business methods patents are just mostly lengthy wordy descriptions of how to shuffle paper. Many of the so-called inventions are no more than feeding data into a computer, letting the computer massage and manipulate the data, and getting some result.

Six weeks into his career as a Patent Examiner, Cranky, as he was leaving for the day, handed his security badge to the guard, saying, “I ain’t coming back.” The guard commented, “Bad day, huh.” Cranky responded, “Bad month.”

So Cranky was back in the ranks of the unemployed. Weeks of unsuccessful job hunting went by, as did weeks of watching the family’s savings evaporate. Even what Cranky thought of as his ace-in-the-hole job didn’t pan out. Given his outdoor experience and several decades of buying their stuff, Cranky figured he could always get a job selling outdoor gear at REI. But his lack of knowledge about modern fabrics and about how one should dress for looking good in the wilderness apparently were reasons for no second interview. Those plus the fact that when asked how previous employers would characterize him, Cranky responded: “trouble accepting authority.” Anyway, Cranky is transferring his business to Hudson Trail Outfitters or Eastern Mountain Sports.

In the meantime, Cranky’s oldest daughter and her husband quit perfectly respectable jobs and move into Cranky’s basement. Bringing with them two dogs the size of ponies. The dogs are named Biff and Biff.

Cranky’s other daughter gets married in some place on the back side of Idaho. Cranky lets off steam by belting out the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” and Elvis’ “Suspicious Minds” at a local karaoke bar. The daughter moves to Kuwait.

Finally, as the year wound down, Cranky landed a temporary writing job at, of all places, the U.S. Senate. The downside is that Cranky is putting in far too many hours. The upside is that it’s a paycheck.

So from Cranky and his family—Ms. Cranky, daughter #1, husband, and Biff and Biff in the basement, daughter #2 and husband in Kuwait—Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Pleasant Holidays, and all that stuff.

DEMOCRATS TAKE AIM AT FOOT

In their effort to tie Iraqi war funding to a timetable for withdrawal, Congressional Democrats are taking dead aim at their collective foot. Only two outcomes seem possible: the Democrats capitulate ignominiously or are blamed for the disruption of Defense Department operations. If an outcome exists that is more favorable to Democrats and their aspirations regarding the 2008 elections but still compatible with tying funding to a withdrawal timetable, it is not apparent.

Why this need to court disaster? One reason is that since the 2006 elections the left wing base of the Democratic party has been accusing Congressional Democrats of being wimps. The attitude is “Hey, we won the election. We captured both the House and the Senate. How come the war is still going on?” This criticism ignores elementary math, nothing complicated like algebra, trigonometry, or calculus, just your basic math, the type you use to balance your check book.

Yes, Democrats captured the House and the Senate. But not by much, certainly not by enough to impose their will on a stubborn, recalcitrant President who has demonstrated zero ability or desire to compromise. The desire of the left wing base for instant gratification is simply unrealistic.

A second reason for courting disaster is extreme anger at that stubborn, recalcitrant President. Someone so densely assured of his own righteousness is most certainly infuriating. Just once you want to wipe that smirk off his face, to make him cry “uncle.” But blinding anger is a dangerous basis for action.

What should the Democrats’ strategy be? Faced with George Bush’s childish my-way-or-the-highway approach, Democrats should unceasingly preach the need for more Democrats in Congress and for a Democrat in the White House. The elections are less than a year away. Patience and an election strategy emphasizing the rational alternative to a Republican party that has purged its moderates and become captive to its own wacko base constitute a smarter approach.

Democrats should also not ignore that a timetable for withdrawal does exist. It was announced by General David Petraeus when he testified to Congress several months ago. It may not be quick enough for many Americans, but it certainly provides a benchmark that the President, and his successor, ignore at their peril.

What the instant-gratification portion of the Democratic Party ignores is that the United States has strategic interests in the Middle East. This interests will last well beyond George Bush’s debacle. Yes, the maintenance of a large military force in Iraq for the indefinite future is not a realistic strategy. But neither is the immediate withdrawal of all military forces.

CRANKY GETS A BLACKBERRY

The Cranky Old Guy’s first calculator was a slide rule. His first key board was part of a manual typewriter. If either of these things is unfamiliar, you might check Wikipedia.

Anyway, Cranky, unable to function on the modest retirement funds he had accrued over the years, recently found himself back in the workforce. And one of the things he was issued his first day on the job was this Blackberry thing.

Now, from time-to-time Cranky has used cell phones, basic cell phones. And they have been a problem. Turning them on and off, seeing things on the little tiny screens, punching little tiny keys with big arthritic fingers, figuring out how to enter phone numbers, how to answer the things, how to actually get a phone number out into the air, all this stuff Cranky only reached a minimum level of competence regarding.

So now Cranky has something that allegedly is a phone, an emailer, a web browser, a GPS navigator, a music player, and a whole bunch of other stuff. But there’s no manual. Supposedly there’s a help button or menu or something, but no tangible manual that you can hold in your hands and thumb through. For Cranky’s generation, manuals are essential.

If Cranky’s success in this new job is dependent upon getting this Blackberry thing to work, he will be shortly looking again. On the other hand, maybe with all the abilities this Blackberry thing has, it can function as a TV. A couch potato at the office: now that’s cool.

IS THE PATENT SYSTEM BROKEN?

Should the arrangement of furniture and equipment, including the provision for a “kid’s area,” in the branch office of a bank receive patent protection? It did in Patent No. 6,681,985, issued January 27, 2004.

Should a search request in the form of “a string of words” in a computerized investment research delivery system receive patent protection? It did in Patent No. 5,502,637, issued March 26, 1996.

Should a “computer program product storing computer instructions therein for instructing a computer to perform a process of at least one of ranking and indexing enterprises with respect to at least one of each other and predetermined criteria to be used in at least one of investment decision making and enterprise decision making” receive patent protection? Whatever it means, it did in Patent No. 6,154,731, issued November 28, 2000.

Such patents may not be evidence of a broken patent system, but they certainly suggest to some that the system needs overhauling. After a stint of a little more than a month as a patent examiner trainee, the Cranky Old Guy is one of those some.

Cranky is a retired federal government employee who is not ready to leave the workforce completely and who needs to pad his pension to pay those lovely Northern Virginia real estate taxes. To handle an avalanche of new patents, the Patent Office is trying to expand by over 1,000 examiners a year. It seemed a good match. Examining patent applications might prove interesting and challenging, and the Patent Office certainly seems to need warm bodies, ideally warm bodies with a little experience, particularly legal experience.

Why does the patent office need new examiners? Between fiscal years 2000 and 2006, the number of utility patent applications, the most common type, filed each year increased from just under 300,000 to over 400,000. At year end for fiscal years 2000 and 2006, the number of applications pending soared from approximately 485,000 to over 1 million. Some applications have been pending for five years or more.

And what is behind those numbers? Two related factors are among the causes of growth. First, in 1998 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued the State Street decision that significantly bolstered the concept of business methods patents (State Street Bank & Trust Company v. Signature Financial Group, Inc.). The decision led to a substantial increase in applications for this type of patent.

Second, and more far-reaching, computers and the digital age have dramatically lowered the costs of innovation and invention in a number of fields, including the business methods field. Using computers, incremental changes to patented items can be investigated and simulated with relative ease. In addition, many so-called inventions today are little more than data-in, data-out manipulations of data. Some broad ill-defined data inputs are run through some sort of computer program or programs the output of which is some broad ill-defined rating, or score, or advice. This soft, fuzzy center is camouflaged by much description of computer hardware and by detailed diagrams and flow charts, but the essence of the so-called inventions is simply the manipulation of data. In the business methods field, a business or finance student on a slow afternoon at the computer can come up with an “invention,” and maybe eventually a patent.

Why is this bad? Because in the hands of a litigious “inventor,” or more likely a litigious collector of patented incremental alterations in existing processes, a patent becomes a tool of extortion and a burden on legitimate commerce. The desirable public policy of rewarding the efforts of a long-tolling inventor falls flat: the efforts were minimal and the tolling was not long.

Currently, the main tool of patent examiners in the rejection of patent applications is known by the term “prior art.” Prior art refers to an invention identical or similar to the one in the pending application. Most prior art is found in patents that have already been issued. In the business methods area, however, many practices have never been patented, indeed were until recent years never considered the proper subject of a patent. Thus even though a method or something very similar has long been in use, no patent covers it. The search then turns to what is called nonpatent literature, but searching nonpatent literature can be very time-consuming and in some cases unproductive. Many long-established, widely-used practices in business are so commonplace that they are not the subject of much publicly available literature.

What is needed in the business methods field, and in other fields, is a more fundamental look at the patent laws, a look that would take into account the ease with which “inventions” can be made in the digital age. Under current law, a utility patent, the most common type, can be granted for any “new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof.”

Note there is no specific mention of “product.” Nevertheless, the patent system, which was established in 1793, has long been operated on the premise that a product falls somewhere in the categories of machine, manufacture, or composition of matter. Indeed, the Supreme Court has stated the expansive view that the patent system covers “anything under the sun that is made by man.”

Prior to 1952, the list of patentable categories began with the word “art.” In that year, art was replaced by “process.” But process has a rather odd, somewhat redundant, and expansive definition of its own in the statute. Process means “process, art, or method, and includes a new use of a known process, machine, manufacture, composition of matter, or material.”

Somewhere out of this history, process evolved to cover a lot that was not likely envisioned in 1952, when computers were just massive number crunchers in the hands of a few scientists and engineers. Whether the term as adopted in 1952 was meant to include the largely intangible data-in, data-out situations that are common today, or indeed any methods that did not involve tangible, physical processes to a substantial degree, is certainly arguable. Perhaps it is time for the courts, Congress, or the Patent Office itself to narrow the definition of process.

“New” and “useful” are two other words that should be revisited. Each has come to have very little limitation upon what may be patented. Indeed, the presumption in many corners of the Patent Office is that an application would not have been submitted unless the contents described something new and useful. The current interpretations of new and useful become even less helpful when the so-called invention is just an incremental change to an existing invention.

For example, in a computerized investment advice process, does the addition of one more input variable, such as the size of a chief executive officer’s salary, create something new enough to be awarded a patent over an existing patent for providing investment advice? And from a broader perspective, just how useful is investment advice anyway? Your brother-in-law’s shoot from the hip approach may well be as useful as any fancy computerized investment advice program available through a brokerage firm.

In short, “new” and “useful” currently are of little help in deciding what deserves a patent and what does not. One consequence is that too many marginal improvements may be receiving unwarranted patent protection.

Other provisions of the patent laws could also be revisited to give patent examiners more powerful tools. For example, an invention must be described in sufficient detail to enable others “skilled in the art” not only to understand it but also to make it themselves. The limits of an invention must be clear. Judicial decisions and Patent Office interpretations, however, have diluted much of the power of these requirements. Particularly with regard to “inventions” in business methods and related intangible and semi-tangible fields, precisely defining what has been invented, how it is to be used, and how it could be replicated by others are requirements to which little more than lip service is often paid.

Finally, regarding business methods patents, of the world’s patent systems the United States system goes the furthest in according them legitimacy. They may be found in other patent systems, but not to the extent and not as explicitly as they are found in this country. Maybe the U.S. patent system has something to learn from the rest of the world.

The state of the patent system is not all gloom and doom. Although a thorough overhauling would likely require a reworking of the patent laws by Congress, other adjustments are taking place.

For many decades, the courts took an expansive view of the scope of the patent laws, a view that the Patent Office was more or less forced to adopt. The courts may be rethinking the matter, however. Recently, for example, the Supreme Court issued a decision (KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc.) that in some circumstances will likely make it more difficult to get a patent.

The Patent Office itself has made admirable efforts on several fronts, including the field of business methods patents. The approval rate of those patents is relatively low, probably no higher than 30 percent. Still, examination of business methods applications requires considerable resources, and the danger that an egregiously absurd business method patent will sneak through the examination and review processes is always a threat.

Among other initiatives, the Patent Office is considering limiting the number of claims, or at least major claims, that a patent application may contain. Claims are the heart of a patent, the words that define exactly what the invention is and what is covered by the patent’s legal umbrella. A common practice among patent applicants is to describe the same invention is several different ways.

The invention may be described as a product consisting of a number of components. Then it may be described again as a method of doing something, the method consisting of steps that are just the components of the previously described product. And then it may be described again as a system, and so on. The result is that a patent application, and an allowed patent, may contain numerous claims: 20, 40, 60, even more. Stating the same invention in several different ways increases significantly the time required for a patent examiner to examine the application. A limitation on claims would reduce the examination burden.

These judicial and regulatory initiatives, however, are probably not enough to cure fully what ails the patent system. The fundamental problem is the expansive definitions that terms in the patent laws have acquired over the decades, and Congress is the best fixer of that problem.

As for Cranky's career as a patent examiner? Well, he's always had a problem playing with others. That plus the growing feeling that he was on the bottom rung of a system in need of serious overhaul led him to pull the plug late one afternoon in early June. In fact, he's thinking of applying for a business methods patent for his method of exit. In the peculiar wording and terminology of the patent world, the claimed invention would be as follows:

“A method of resigning from a position comprising the steps of handing one’s security badge to the security guard at the exit with the comment, ‘I ain’t coming back,’ having the security guard respond with a chuckle, ‘Bad day, huh,’ and in turn responding, ‘Bad month.’”

RETURN ON SUCCESS

Okay, so it isn’t the greatest motivating slogan to come down the pike. In fact, it’s really pretty pathetic. Smacks much too much of W’s business antecedents. The folks at W’s alma mater, Harvard Business School, should be proud.

But let’s get to tonight’s speech. The Democrats will most likely go berserk and attack the President’s reasoning and conclusions with considerable vehemence. But they ought to pause. W has served up a pitch just begging to be knocked out of the park.

What W has done is adopt the principal of withdrawal. That is what the Democrats, indeed most of the American people, want. Now all we are doing is quibbling over the details.

The Dems ought to say:

“The President has finally seen the light. He is withdrawing troops from Iraq. We applaud him. We don’t totally agree with him on the details, schedules, but we are now together on the principle that the U.S. footprint must be reduced. So let’s see if we can speed this thing up a little.”

TIME FOR MOVEON TO MOVE ON

The first nail in the possible coffin was pounded Monday, September 10, 2007. The nail was an ad in the New York Times. The pounder was the leftist group Moveon.org. The poundee was the hopes of the Democratic Party for the presidency in 2008.

In a burst of unthinking exuberance, Moveon succumbed to adolescent smart-aleckness by playing upon the name of commanding general in Iraq, David Petraeus. The name became BeTray Us. The slander was immediately pounced upon by Republicans and their allies in the land of punditry, enabling them to distract attention from the Congressional hearings on the war in Iraq.

Most Americans are likely offended by the slandering of an honorable four-star general. And most Americans include those in the center of the political spectrum—independents and moderate Republicans and Democrats—who determine the outcome of Presidential elections. But offense is something that those at the extremes of the political spectrum, either on the left or right, have little concern for.

Indeed, a never-ending task facing both political parties is to mesh their extreme with their portion of the center. And a never-ending effort on the part of both political parties is to characterize the other as the captive of its extreme.

Over approximately the last three decades, the Republican Party has probably been the most successful in portraying the opponent as a reflection of its extreme. And the extreme of the Democratic Party is viewed as anti-military, against the use of force, naïve, touchy-feely, and prone to inflammatory language.

Moveon’s ad played into the Republicans’ stereotype of Democrats and served to remind citizens of that stereotype. The ad’s inflammatory nature ensured widespread attention. So how is the ad helpful to Moveon’s political home, the Democratic Party?

It isn’t. And the centrists in the Party, and the Party’s Presidential hopefuls, ought to say so, forcefully. More generally, it’s time that centrists in both parties, assuming there are any left in the Republican Party, start treating their fringes with more firmness. Most Americans are in the center of the political spectrum. As things now stand, they are represented in large part only by the stalemate between the political fringes.

SENATOR CRAIG GETS THE SHAFT

Opps. Pardon the double entendre, or whatever. Anyway, Idaho’s poor Senator Larry Craig has joined the sizeable ranks of those in the Republican Party who preach but do not practice family values. Their motto: Do What I Say, Not What I Do.

But after listening to the recording of the post-arrest conversation between the arresting officer and the good Senator, the cranky old guy thinks the Senator got the shaft, at least the legal shaft. Admittedly, in that men’s room at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport the Senator certainly seemed to be after more than Number 1 or Number 2 relief. And even if he had successfully fought the charges, little public doubt would have existed as to what he was indeed after (Number 3 relief?).

A good defense attorney, however, would have had a shot at convincing a judge or a jury that guilt beyond a reasonable doubt did not exist. After all, what actually happened?

The Senator looked through the cracks between the edges of stall doors and stall walls. The explanation? He just wanted to find an empty stall.

He rubbed his hands in a suggestive way. The explanation? His hands itched.

After entering a stall, his foot touched the foot of the guy—the arresting officer—in the next stall. The explanation? Hey, those stalls are small. And some people do sit wide.

He reached his hand under the stall wall. The explanation? He was trying to pick up a piece of paper (caveat here: how many people feel compelled to pick up something off the floor of a public restroom).

He was reaching with his left hand under the stall wall, an action requiring, since he was in the stall to the left of the officer, that he reach down across his body, then up. The explanation? The officer was mistaken about the left hand. Besides, what does it matter which hand it was?

Now the officer would likely testify that the sequence and scope of the Senator’s actions are common to those seeking Number 3 relief in public restrooms. But the defense attorney would note the reasonable explanations, and would emphasize that nothing actually happened: no one unzipped in front of the other, laid a hand on the other, touched a sexual appendage of the other.

In short, it was all just a little men’s room misunderstanding. The Senator goes legally free, subjected only to massive public derision.

Incidentally, if the cranky old guy ever changes planes in Minneapolis-St. Paul again, he will try to hold his water until he’s back in the air.

George Bush And Vietnam

George Bush, that Vietnam tough guy—even though he was never actually there, which, incidentally, applies to others in his talk-tough-about-war Administration—is now giving us a history lesson. The lesson apparently is that never-ending pursuit of some ill-defined “victory” is preferable to any rational discussion and analysis of what may actually be achievable.

In an August 22 speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention in Kansas City, the President cited various aspects of the war against Japan in the 1940s, the war in South Korea in the 1950s, and the war in Vietnam in the 1960s as arguments for “getting the job done” in Iraq. And the major point about Iraq seemed to be that if we left before the “job” was “done,” a bloodbath would ensue.

Well Mr. President, maybe, but a bloodbath is ensuing already. Besides, just about every prediction you and your buddies have made about Iraq has proved wrong. For example, we found no WMD, we weren’t greeted as liberators, the force we (actually you) sent to control the country was inadequate, and so on.

The point is that the track record of your and your cohort’s predictive powers is pretty poor. Maybe a bloodbath would ensue, but maybe not, particularly if we stop talking belligerently about some undefined “victory.” A controlled, gradual withdrawal—say over a two-year period—as we try to bring the Iraqi Army and Government up to some minimal level of competence seems a much more realistic goal than “victory,” and perhaps would not lead to a bloodbath.

And if it did lead to a bloodbath, it would not be an American bloodbath. This may sound harsh, but the inhabitants of the Middle East have been bathing in blood for millennia. We are not going to change that in a few years or so.

A couple of other things, Mr. President. First, one can make the case that your mindless pursuit of something called “victory” has actually made our task in the Middle East much harder. The way you have gone about the ill-named war on terror has probably created more terrorists than even a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq ever would. Second, please stop talking about the terrorists following us home. Yes, another terrorist attack on American soil is certainly possible, maybe even likely, in the years ahead. But your imagery of the last Soldier, Sailor, or Marine leaving Iraq being followed onto the plane or ship by a terrorist is just nuts.

KARAOKE

Recently, the Cranky Old Guy learned about this new fad called karaoke. There are these bars where instead of listening to music, you actually get to participate in making the music. You get up on the stage, or just up in front of the bar’s customers, watch a little TV-type screen across which flash the words of a song, and attempt to sing the song. Accompanying music is provided by electronic technology that is well beyond the Cranky Old Guy’s comprehension.

Anyway, the Cranky Old Guy found himself beyond the beyond, specifically in a remote part of the State of Idaho. Now, don’t take this the wrong way because the Cranky Old Guy’s heritage is deeply rooted in parts of rural Virginia and Maryland where “redneck” describes the more refined inhabitants, but this particular bar in this particular part of Idaho had some colorful folks.

The occasion was an impromptu party following the marriage of a daughter. After the festivities, a small group, at the behest of an individual we shall call “Kathleen,” adjourned to a local bar where karaoke facilities were provided. Among the small group were some individuals who had experience with this karaoke thing, although in staid New England. One of these individuals, we’ll call him “Adrian,” promptly got up on the stage and belted out a semi-recognizable version of Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline.

Now the Cranky Old Guy expected the worse. How would this crowd of colorful folk in a remote part of Idaho react to an obvious interloper bellowing “Hands, Touching Hands, Reaching Out, Touching Me, Sweet Caroline. . .?”

Cranky prepared himself for mayhem. He wondered if he would comport himself up to the standard Toby Keith sang about in Not As Good As I Once Was. But surprise, the crowd went wild with enthusiasm. One particular young lady, in a bikini only partially covered by cut-off farmer’s overalls, practically mauled poor Adrian in a paroxysm of ecstasy.

So the evening went. To increasing excitement, Adrian sang more songs. He was joined by “Bart,” maybe not quite as talented but possessed with considerable exuberance. “Charles” provided dance moves of unparalleled contortions. Kathleen, “Betty,” “Adie,” and “Ronda” functioned as serious groupies. “William” managed to maintain a designated driver status.

Finally, Cranky, who definitely was not maintaining a designated driver status, was prevailed upon to join the song fest. He, Adrian, and Bart did a version of the Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling that would have been the envy of Mav, Cougar, and the Iceman. The crowd went nuts.

After a few more songs, it was time to go. The crowd yelled “No, not yet!” So the group together did one more song: Elvis’ Suspicious Minds. Cranky, who actually remembers Elvis, let it all hang out. As they departed to thunderous applause, Cranky swore he heard the good ol’ boy running the karaoke equipment announce, “Elvis has left the building.”

Cranky has visions of a karaoke tour.

THE HONORABLE WOMAN HAD CLEAVAGE

The cranky old guy was browsing through the land of cable TV the other night when he stumbled upon C-Span’s coverage of the British Parliament. A system in which government leaders have to actually answer questions and attempt to explain their actions is certainly a pleasant contrast with a system revolving around an uncommunicative, haughty executive branch, so cranky paused to watch.

And lo and behold, another pleasant contrast with the U.S. system revealed itself: cleavage. The Prime Minister was not present, and the government’s side in the parry and thrust of debate was being led by the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith. And The Honorable Ms. Smith was sporting an only partially concealed pair of honest-to-gosh hooters. Cranky kept expecting a member of the opposition to say something like “Before discussing the problem sparrows in East Fendwich, I wish to compliment the Honorable Woman on her most ample endowments.” But no one commented on the awesome sight.

Now one has to ask oneself how such a display of political cleavage would be received on this side of the Atlantic. Can you imagine a similar revelation by the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, or Susan Collins going uncommented upon?

And how would the commentary break down ideologically? Both liberals and conservatives would snicker, but the conservative side, unless the displayer was one of their own, would also launch into rants about the general moral degeneracy of anyone not a true blue conservative. In other words, conservatives would play their usual tut-tutting role, still trying to obliterate the memory of the 1960s.

The different likely reaction on this side of the Atlantic might be explained by this nation’s youth. The United Kingdom is an old nation, and its views might be categorized as matronly and world weary. The United States, on the other hand, might be compared to an adolescent just experiencing the full force of puberty and convinced the world is one big double-entendre.